New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Are we now worse at verbal recall, and if so, why?

An acquaintance of mine in Oxford, who is a Catholic priest, is learning the psalter by heart. There are 150 psalms altogether. This has proven to be a challenging task (note that he also has an academic day job, next to duties as a priest, so he can't devote himself to the task full-time). Some psalms are catchy or short, others have interesting and striking metaphors, express recognizable emotions ranging from deep despair to hopeful optimism, and the very best (or most well-known) combine these elements, such as psalm 23 and psalm 42. But other psalms are harder to remember (think of psalm 119, for instance [this psalm has an acrostic structure that helps recall a bit, but still, it's very long...). In all, my acquaintance expects that the memorization process will take him years. When he has finally mastered all psalms "I will know as much as a 15-year-old boy in 1st century Israel". It seems that we are today a lot worse at accurate recall of verbal information (stories, songs, etc) than people in the past. An exquisite verbal memory was required to orally transmit long narrations like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Actors in Elizabethan times needed to learn about 70 different roles in one year time. If it is true that we are worse at verbal recall, why would this be so?

why did "phenomonology" start to be seen as anti-metaphysical? some hypotheses.

The folks at the ATMOC mirror site (shout out to Mark Ohm, Leah Orth, and Emily Beck Cogburn) are almost finished with our translation of Raphaël Millière's inaugural lecture.

It's a fascinating piece that would serve as an excellent first reading in an upper level undergraduate or graduate level survey course in metaphysics. One of the many interesting things in it is the discussion of anti-metaphysics movements and arguments in analytical and continental philosophy.  If one patiently examines the history of these, then many of the standard comicbook views just fall away.

The weirdest thing is that contemporary anti-metaphysical phenomenologists such as Janicaud in some ways have far more in common with early analytic philosophers such as the logical positivists, and perhaps even more so with the first generation of post-positivists such as Quine and Strawson, than they do with early phenomenologists such as Father van Breda, the founder of the Husserl archives at Lueven [the ATMOC mirror site is currently translating parts of a fascinating conference that includes a discussion between van Breda and Strawson; I'll post on that next week].

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Segue o seco'

I'm still in the middle of my period of over-commitment, so here's another short BMoF. Today I'm posting 'Segue o seco' by Marisa Monte, of her 1994 album with a long title (which escapes me at the moment). As I said before, I'm really not that big a fan of Marisa Monte, but this song I really love. The video is pretty good too (albeit a bit pretentious), so the whole thing is quite likely to make you happy on this Friday morning.

We need "less attention to disciplinary boundaries, not a more sharply demarcated domain of our own where we rule as sovereigns."

In this Scholium [to the definition in the Principia--ES]Newton steps back and discusses the concepts of space and time that are, in his view, requisite for making sense of the laws of physics. This sort of question is the sort that we now recognize as a philosophical question, and much of the current discussions in the philosophy of space and time trace their origins to this issues raised in Newton’s Scholium, which is so widely quoted in the philosophical literature on space and time that I suspect that most philosophers who work in that area know it by heart. Wayne Myrvold

Myrvold, a distinguished philosopher of physics, has a sensible piece on the dust-up between Lawrence Krauss and Dave Albert; Myrvold also corrects a lot of silly things that have been said about the history of physics along the way.

Philo of Economics: Reason can't be the slave of the passions, if it is an active principle (Hume vs Smith)

One disastrously misleading trope in the study of Adam Smith is that his fundamental metaphysical and psychological commitments are basically Hume's. I attack it regularly in print. (See, e.g., here, here, here, here.) But I have overlooked a very important example of the way in which Smith deviates from Hume. Consider this passage:

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it. But what makes this difference? When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? When we are always so much more deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves, than by whatever concerns other men; what is it which prompts the generous, upon all occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others? It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others, calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration. It is from him only that we learn the real littleness of ourselves, and of whatever relates to ourselves, and the natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator. (The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), emphasis added)

I just can't keep from crying sometimes

Horrifying story about Wells Fargo HERE. Just a sample:

The Rousseaus hired a lawyer. From the lawyer the Rousseaus learned that the loan they received was not the loan they were promised, including, “the 7.2% interest rate for the … loan was actually higher than the 2006 loan and greater than the 6.8% quoted,” had enormous fees, and the bank had increased the income the Rousseau had stated, from $76,000 to $136,800.

In other words, the lender had scammed them to get those fees, which was a widespread practice at the time.

This continues, with the bank scamming, lying, obfuscating, ignoring, contradicting, even producing signatures it claimed were the Rousseau’s but were not, every step of the way. And, of course, adding late fees to the amount it claimed was due.

In addition to all of this, Wells Fargo messed up their own paperwork and falsely determined that the Rousseau's had missed a payment, and through this mistake were able to successfully charge horrendous fees on the Rousseaus and foreclose on the house.

The first most horrifying thing is that this lead to Mr. Rousseau's suicide, and the third most horrifying thing is how widespread these practices were under the Bush economy. The second most horrifying thing is that there seems to be no chance that the rent-seeking companies who do these kinds of things will be held accountable in any way. 

I don't know; I'm still hoping that the good guys will win. . . maybe that's naive.

There is no reason to take Mark Regnerus' apologists serioiusly

Nice background on his history of Regnerus' almost unbelievably foul misogynistic "research" and punditry HERE. The story's punchline:

What do we need with a retrograde researcher who instructs young women to reorder their lives according to men’s “market value”; who treats women like a uniform mass of economic actors seeking only to turn their relationships into marriage with kids; who can’t quite imagine a world in which women have sex for sexual reasons (once describing female consent as “sexual strategies for making men 'fall in love’”); and who traffics in the mid-century notion that the timing of marriage should be arranged around a woman’s “most fertile years”?  Now that Regnerus has definitively added “provider of ill-conceived research to Focus-On-The-Family types” to his CV, here’s hoping that more news outlets will decide that his isn’t a voice we need at all.

Past and present: two illusions

A recent post here by Helen De Cruz and a not-so-recent post elsewhere by Eric Schwitzgebel will serve as hooks from which to hang some thoughts about two complementary illusions: the transparency of the present, the opacity of the past.

Helen, a lutenist, asks whether she can “ever claim to understand” the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century music she’s playing. There is a “gap”—a gap familiar to anyone who has undertaken to perform early music—between us and the works.

Schwitzgebel, on the other hand, is not much worried about our access to old texts.

Maybe empirically oriented philosophers typically don’t regard themselves as expert enough in history of philosophy to write about it. But I think we hobble ourselves if we allow ourselves to be intimidated. The standard of expertise for writing about Descartes or Kant in the context of a larger project — a project that isn’t just Descartes or Kant interpretation — shouldn’t be world leadership in Descartes or Kant interpretation. It should be the same standard of expertise as in writing about a contemporary colleague with a large body of influential work, like Dennett or Fodor.

In a way I agree with Schwitzgebel. A “world leader” in Descartes scholarship knows far more, in some respects, than you or I need to know in order to read the Meditations. But what exactly is the “standard of expertise” required in writing about one of our contemporaries?

The Sense of Time Passed

I work all afternoon, completely absorbed, on a paper. After some hours, I sit up and think, “It must be five o’clock already.” I look at my watch: I am right. I feel as if I’ve been sitting here for three hours, and I have been. This sort of feeling is not terribly reliable—how often have you had such a thought, only to find that it is four, or seven?—but usually we give it at least some credence. What sort of feeling is it? It seems to be a perception of an interval of time past? But how could it be?

Senate Committee Invites Written Testimony on Solitary Confinement

This announcement was recently posted on Solitary Watch:

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the Senate’s Assistant Majority Leader, will chair a hearing on the   human rights, fiscal, and public safety consequences of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers.  This is the first-ever Congressional hearing on solitary confinement.  Over the last several decades, the United States has witnessed an explosion in the use of solitary confinement for federal, state, and local prisoners and detainees.  The hearing will explore the psychological and    psychiatric impact on inmates during and after their imprisonment, the higher costs of running solitary housing units, the human rights issues surrounding the use of isolation, and successful state reforms in this area.

This hearing is open to the public.  The list of witnesses will be announced on a future date.

Chairman Durbin invites interested advocates and experts to submit written testimony to be included in the hearing record.  Statements should be less than 10 pages, and should be emailed to Nicholas Deml at [email protected] as early as possible, but no later than Friday, June 15, 2012 at    5:00 PM.

Below is my draft for a letter to the committee.  If you have any constructive feedback, please post a comment here before the deadline of June 15.  I have tried to write from a philosophical perspective that is accessible to non-philosophers.

Race and Genetics in Hungary

Nature reports that a genetic diagnostic company in Hungary, Nagy Gen, was asked for and delivered a racial purity test. An unnamed MP of the far right Jobbik party asked the company to certify that he had no Roma or Jewish ancestry. The company, which has until recently been located at the Eötvös Loránd University, "scanned 18 positions in the MP’s genome for variants that it says are characteristic of Roma and Jewish ethnic groups; its report concludes that Roma and Jewish ancestry can be ruled out."

Teaching Indian Philosophy

Apropos our recent discussions (and here) of introducing Asian philosophy into content courses (e.g., Introduction to Philosophy), here is Christopher Framarin's informative review of Stephen Phillips's Epistemology in Classical India: The Knowledge Sources of the Nyaya School.  (Framarin is at the University of Calgary, by the way, a school that has, for a long time had strength in Indian Philosophy.)

To convey the flavour of the subject matter, a brief extract from Framarin's review:

John Corvino article in the New Republic

Article HERE. It's nice to see Corvino eviscerate Mark Regnerus, though his conclusion is almost unbearably depressing:

None of this knowledge, sadly, will prevent same-sex-marriage opponents from citing the study as evidence for their position. That’s unfortunate because it’s illogical and unfair. But it’s especially unfortunate because it misses yet another opportunity to focus on actual child welfare.

But the depression is mitigated somewhat by the fact that one of our magazines of record has posted such an effective takedown.

Alright fine, I'll be a dwarf

[Update: Oops, I forgot to give the link that was the original reason I started writing this last night. Check out Ilan Dar-Nimrod on the supposed changing definition of cool HERE. As is clear from my post, I suspect that the research in question is actually a case of what happens at the end of the video at right. I would like to warn current sociologists of cool that it is with grave peril that we forget Lester Bangs' canonical praise of uncool.]

Last week I hit the nerd trifecta. 

First, my brother-in-law showed up in town bearing an Atari Jaguar, the company-destroying console that is finding a weird third act resurgence among aficionados.

Then, my friend Neal Hebert once again got us employed as seat warmers for World Wrestling Entertainment. I should explain. In televised wrestling the stationary cameras all point in one direction and the action is choreographed towards those cameras. But because of this it's imperative that the seats on the other side of the ring always be full.

But people get up to go to the bathroom, smoke a cigarette, or stand in line at the concession stand. And sometimes people just leave.  So wrestling promotions employ people to hop from empty seat to seat. It's actually a little bit scary because the marks in the audience think you are trying to steal their friend's seat and some portion of them don't believe you when you tell them that you are a WWE employee. Anyhow, this last Smackdown two people with eye level seats never came back from the concession stand, so Skylar and I ended up watching over half the show from the best seats in the arena (during a show which included matches with two of  my favorite wrestlers, famed luchador Psichosis and Chicago powerhouse CM Punk). This had the weird result of Skylar and me reliably being blurrily on camera for large stretches. For example, go to the video HERE and pause it at 12:22. That's me just one person up from the right hand bottom of the screen. Skylar and I are not marks. We knew that Kane's pyro was about to boom and that's why we've got our fingers in our ears. Skylar is the bald guy next to me.

Malament Retirement Blues

Some of the things you really need to know about David Malament's contributions to philosophy of physics (and a few other interesting facts):   [HT Taking up Spacetime]

On the fact-ideas distinction, or how not to apologize for lack of generosity in one's citations

Here at NewAPPS we have been following critically the story of how Julian Young's notes of Curtis Cate's book "sometimes lost contact with their sources" (see here, here, here, and here). Eva Cybulska calls our attention to Julian Young's latest non-apology.

Rather than reminding Young that he still has not done the minimally acceptable thing in this matter, we will just quote him as an example of a modern-day apology: in the apt words of my colleague, Dennis Des Chene, "deny having done anything exactly, um, wrong, while reducing your victim to a mere compiler of timetables." Young writes:

"That certain of Cate's phrases appeared in my book is entirely due to my inexperience and carelessness as a biographer. Sometimes a phrase just stuck in my head, appropriated so completely that it seemed to be my own. The main problem, however, was this. Cate was where I first began to try to grasp the facts of Nietzsche's life. Consequently, my notes on his book were written four or five years before I began to write the biography itself. Coming across a phrase in my notes I too quickly took it to be a précis of my reading of Cate whereas it now transpires that occasionally it was Cate's own phrase. Trained as I am to be on guard against unacknowledged use of other people's ideas, I was too relaxed when it came to the manner of reporting biographical facts. Without properly thinking about it, I tended to assume—wrongly—that the manner of reporting humdrum historical facts no more counts as intellectual property than the manner of reporting a bus timetable. Since Cate appeared in my bibliography I assumed it would be obvious that I had used him as a source of basic historical data. This was naïve and thoughtless."

Hey girl, can't I be in a fascist movie without everyone making a big deal about it?

Feminist Ryan Gosling "hey girl" meme here. The fascist movie (extra-legal violence by state agents necessary to provide security to the populace) is this one: 

 

Intuitive musical knowledge: can a performer of early music be largely ignorant of historical practice?

Since about 14 years, I have been playing the Renaissance lute, a 15-stringed pear-shaped instrument of the guitar family. When performing Renaissance music, I have musical intuitions that guide my interpretation. Are these anachronistic western standards I'm imposing on the music, or do I in some sense really have knowledge about how this music is supposed to be performed due to my familarity with it? 

The interesting thing about the lute is that its current practice does not follow continuous, living tradition, but entirely the result of careful and ongoing historical reconstruction. Lutes fell into disuse in the 18th century, and interest for them was only rekindled in the 1960s, as part of a general tendency in musical practice towards historical accuracy. The way lute players position their hands, the playing technique, phrasing and interpretation of the music has been carefully reconstructed, using instruction books, letters, paintings and other sources. The interpretation of the music is particularly challenging: most lute music is written in tablature (of which there are at least 6 standardized notations), which is rather underdetermined - to put it mildly. There are almost no indications of tempo (no metronome indications) or dynamics. It's just the bare notes. As an illustration, here are the opening bars of a piece I'm currently studying, Dowland's Earl of Essex galliard:

Metaphysics is alive and well and living in Paris (English language mirror site of the Atelier de métaphysique et d'ontologie contemporaines)

[Note: In this rather long-winded post I take way too long to get to the punchline. So let me first just say that my students Mark Ohm and Leah Orth, with help from me and my wife Emily, are putting up an English language mirror site of the Atelier de métaphysique et d'ontologie contemporaines (please check out our translation of the Introduction to the Workshop to get an idea of what's going on). As we post translations of each paper or discussion, I'll do a post here at NewApps linking to it and describing the content. Now on to the long-windedness.]

Readers of this blog know of my worry that two factors systematically distort Americans interaction with non-American philosophy: (1) the effective monolingualism of the overwhelming majority of students in American philosophy classrooms, and (2) the fact that it is books that are translated.

Tim Kreider's ode to Ray Bradbury

If apropos anything, someone asks you what side you are on, it is always felicitous to respond, "truth and beauty."

In this respect, I highly recommend Tim Kreider's NY Times tribute to Ray Bradbury HERE (if you are blocked by the pay-wall, just reset your cookies or "Clear Recent History" in Firefox).

When I read Bradbury's books as a young child I had no idea that the stuff of his nightmares were actually coming to pass. Nor could I have realized the extent to which I would later organize my life around fleeing those very things.

Kreider's conclusion is perfect:

I think of Ray Bradbury’s work often these days. I remember “The Murderer” whenever I ask for directions or make a joke to someone who can’t hear me because of her ear buds, when I see two friends standing back-to-back in a crowd yelling “Where are you?” into their phones, or I’m forced to eavesdrop on somebody prattling on Bluetooth in that sanctum sanctorum, the library. I think of “Fahrenheit 451” every time I see a TV screen in an elevator or a taxi or a gas pump or over a urinal. When the entire hellish engine of the media seemed geared toward the concerted goal of forcing me to know, against my will, about a product called “Lady Gaga,” I thought: Denham’s Dentifrice.

It is thanks to Ray Bradbury that I understand this world I grew into for what it is: a dystopian future. And it is thanks to him that we know how to conduct ourselves in such a world: arm yourself with books. Assassinate your television. Go for walks, and talk with your neighbors. Cherish beauty; defend it with your life. Become a Martian.

Also check out the song at right. Bowie understood Ray Bradbury. For all the suffering it entails, it is still infinitely better to be Martian than caveman.

Scientific knowledge does not supplant earlier intuitions

I've just finished reading McCauley's Why religion is natural and science is not (2011, OUP), a book I already bought at the eastern APA last year, but only now gotten round to reading. See this video for a 2-minute summary of the book (book trailer). McCauley makes an interesting case for the "naturalness" of religion and the "unnaturalness" of science. He uses "natural" (or, more specifically, "maturationally natural'') in a fairly restrictive sense, namely as those properties of human thought that arise early in development, without explicit instruction. Examples include speaking a natural language, walking, and chewing. 

McCauley thinks science is not natural. Science provides us with concepts and world views that are contrary to our everyday knowledge and experience. For instance, the heliocentric model of the Earth orbiting Sun contradicts our visual observation of the Sun moving across the sky; particle physics is at odds with our intuitive understanding of solid objects. Scientific modes of explanation and ways of thinking are also contrary to our maturationally natural capacities. For example, the empirical sciences have, over time, appealed less and less to agents as causes, and more to impersonal causes to explain events. A recent paper by Shtulman and Valcarcel, in press in Cognition supports the unnaturalness of science thesis.

Ruth Barcan Marcus Clinic for Logic

I received the following notice from Axel Mueller of Northwestern University. We hope its ideas can be transposed to other schools.

------

We just got notice from Northwestern's administration that they authorize our Ruth Barcan Marcus Clinic for Logic. This is a peer-tutoring program aimed at supporting students in our large Intro to Logic courses who are either 'struggling' (i.e. perform at or below C-) or performing below their own average GPA-level in logic.

This initiative grew out of the realization that philosophy, and particularly logic, has a pattern of discouragement and underrepresentation of women and other groups entering college with a disadvantage that is more similar to STEM-fields than to humanities or social sciences. Our own in-house statistics showed that, while the enrollment of women in logic was at about 30%, the ratio of women among the group of struggling students was at 50%, and among the group of students underperforming at about 48%. We concluded that logic would be a good place to start in removing sources of discouragement.

According to the stereotype-threat and micro-messaging research, it seemed to us likely that the overproportional presence of women (and other stereotypically disadvantaged groups, whose ratios were even worse) was not being affected by the routine discussion groups lead by GAs, but called for the pin-pointed and face-to-face removal of pre-existing individual difficulties of either a motivational nature or, very often, a grown adversity in formal sciences that is based on precisely the stereotyping patterns the effects of which we try so hard to overcome. The Dean's office acknowledged that fact and for this reason gave the go ahead.

On Fashionable Ghosts--what if philosophic trends just are fashions...

A few months ago Matti Eklund published the following: "The research program isn’t abandoned simply on the ground that seemingly compelling arguments against its fundamental assumptions are presented. Rather, it is abandoned when research conducted within its confines is no longer seen as fruitful, and when a new alternative, with some promise of success, is available." It provoked a response by me in which a I suggested that the combination of (i) viewing philosophy as normal science (PANS) and (ii) viewing philosophical "trends" as "inevitable" changes in fashion was toxic. In particular, if (i) and (ii) are true then institutional power plays an out-sized role in philosophy, yet (i) and (ii) don't leave much room to even mention power: for PANS assumes that ruling ideas just are best supported and (ii) assumes that things could not have been otherwise and (given that ought implies can) nobody is required to do anything to change our situation. As I suggested in my response to Eklund, PANS promotes the idea that one can safely ignore even well-founded arguments from sociological outsiders. (Mohan was underwhelmed; recall my response.)

Yesterday, while reading this fascinating review of a book-length defense of ordinary language philosophy, I was haunted by the thought that Eklund got it right. For example, as a graduate student I was very unimpressed by ordinary language philosophy (OLP), which I found not only too driven by pumping of intuitions of upper-class native English speakers -- and their wannabe emulators -- but also completely irrelevant to anything worth thinking about. (It also seemed to me to have been made irrelevant by progress in linguistic science.) But in recent years I have started to wonder if one of its main assumptions, the denial that it is "possible to identify or form ultimate meanings associated with the various words or expressions" isn't...(ahum) true (in a deflationary sense, of course).

Now, I was primed for my renewed concern about the role of fashion in philosophy by a recent read of Huw Price's reflection on the Carnap/Quine debate, "that metaphysics is as dead, or at least deflated, as Carnap left it." As Price (the Bertrand Russell Professor at Cambridge) explains:

Paradoxes give him heartburn

Via Language Log, an irresistable remix of the Liar Paradox, from Ed McBain’s Blood Relatives (1975). The setup includes Police Detective Carella, a memo from the Commissioner about memos, and a rubber stamp. Go read the rest…

Brazilian music on Fridays: O Rappa

I’m on a string of 5 conferences/lectures in 6 weeks, and by the time this goes online, I’ll be in St. Andrews for the final Foundations of Logical Consequence conference. So obviously I’m not having as much time for blogging and for BMoF in particular as I’d like to, but I’ll try not to skip a week.

For today, I’m posting a couple of songs by O Rappa, one of the most successful rock/reggae/hip-hop Brazilian bands of the last decade. The have been active since the mid-1990s, but it’s mostly in the 2000s that they established themselves as big players. I remember when I first heard their first big hit ‘Pescador de ilusões’ (posted below) in the car, it blew me away; I still really love the song. From the same 1996 album (Rappa Mundi) I’m posting ‘Ilê Ayê’, a ‘black power’ anthem (here in the original version, by the percussion ensemble of the same name); and from their 1999 album Lado B lado A, the award-winning video of ‘Minha Alma’. Ok, I guess I’m still failing to post new stuff – sorry Bruno! But for those who enjoy the songs below, you should definitely check O Rappa’s more recent work as well.

Weekly philo of Economics: Mandeville's approach to expert failure (in Medicine)

Is there an institutional framework which will promote trustworthy experts? Milton Friedman waged a life-long, futile campaign against the American Medical Association's (AMA) guild-like ability to control licensing of physicians, entry into the profession, as well as standards of medicine:

Licensure has reduced both the quantity and quality of medical practice; that is has reduced the opportunities available to people who would like to be physicians, forcing them to pursue occupations they regard as less attractive; that it has forced the public to pay more for less satisfactory medical service, and that it has retarded technological development both in medicine itself and in the organization of medical practice. (M. Friedman, 1994)

Yet, as Friedman recognized, individuals are unwilling to trust the market to provide "evidence on the quality of a physician." Friedman was unimpressed by claims about the solidity of our medical profession; he believed it revealed "the tyranny of the status quo and the poverty of our imagination in fields in which we are laymen."

Not unlike Locke, Mandeville was a trained and practicing physician. In A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases, in Three Dialogues (1711/1730), Mandeville diagnoses a market failure in medicine: from "self-interest" (then) "young physicians" avoid the "laborious, but tedious way of getting money" that is "spend your ime before the squallid beds of poor patients, and bear with the unsavory smells of a crowded hospital." (39; throughout I am quoting from the 1730 edition.) In doing so physicians fail to build up a stock of diverse and careful empirical practice (unlike the Ancient empiricks). Modern doctors find other ways to obtain a wealthy clientèle by building a reputation among fashionable and rich circles. As I have discussed before one way they can do so is by seeming learned in abstruse sciences (such as mathematics). But Mandeville also recognizes that there are other ways for doctors to get a good clientèle, including sponsoring/producing learned productions, marrying "into a good Family, and your relations will help your into practice, or else cringe and make your court to half a dozen noted apothecaries, promise them to prescibe loads of loads of" prescriptions, "get, but in favor with one that has great business, and yours is done." (40) As he puts it: "Physicians did not begin to reason about Physick [the body], and make Hypotheses, because they thought that what they writ was true, and be of service to thier postericy in curing the sick; but to ingratiate themselves with they ages they lived in." (65) None of these strategies involve curing actual patients.

Necessarily Grateful! Kvetching about Kripke-mania

This brilliantly written review has been annoying me since it appeared on NDPR. I am not sure why; maybe it shouldn't. The review opens with a cute argument:

If Kripke did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. If it were necessary to invent K, it would be possible to invent K. If K could be invented by J, and K innovated I, then J could have innovated I. For most ideas, I, recounted or reappraised in this first-rate collection of original essays on Kripke's philosophical work: only K could have innovated I. Therefore, in case you weren't sure: Kripke exists. Thank God.

It ends with a quote from Mark Richard (not the reviewer): "thanks to Saul Kripke for providing a model of how philosophy can be rigorous and accessible, genuinely significant and still fun."

Gratitude to our intellectual leaders, who do indeed provide us with models to emulate, is an important, under-appreciated virtue in contemporary philosophy. So it is nice to see it made so central to this review, which is usefully critical in other respects. (But why gratitude to God?) Yet, here is an axiom in the logic of assertion: if you need to keep saying that something is "genuinely significant," it necessarily isn't. (Repeat exercise for "still fun," "rigorous," and "accessible.")

The problematic premise in Burgess's little opening argument is, of course, "only K could have innovated I." Maybe this is true in some distant world where K becomes self-same with God/Substance (etc), but it is not true of mere mortals--unless, of course, I is part of an entirely idiosyncratic if not mad game. We can recognize this brute fact while appreciating Kripke's genuine achievements in modal logic and philosophy of language.

Des Knaben Neukantianismus

On the Danube.

McGinn probably doesn't have time to read anybody else...

With Colin McGinn publishing a book at a very steady clip (the list on Wikipedia is incomplete!) it is no surprise that another reviewer notices that McGinn seems to have little interest in engaging with opposing views (recall this review): "In light of the vast philosophical area covered by the book, it is unfortunate that McGinn fails to take into account crucial parts of the literature with a real bearing on his meta-philosophical project. (It is illustrative to note that the book's reference list is a mere page and a half.)" And also: "McGinn's oversights with respect to significant parts of the relevant philosophical and empirical literature, on this topic just like on the ones highlighted in the above, make his book unlikely to advance current discussions on the problems and prospects of conceptual analysis."

Faith as an attitude distinct from hope and belief - are aesthetic reasons sufficient reasons for faith?

I've just met Robert Audi in Oxford. With a small group of philosophers of religion, we looked at his excellent new book Rationality and religious commitment (Oxford, 2012). One of the claims of this book (in particular chapter 3) is that faith has been often conflated with belief, but that both are distinct attitudes. Faith (and not just religious faith) in something entails a (usually global) positive attitude towards this person/proposition; is compatible with doubt, and is - unlike belief - at least in part under voluntary control.

A particularly interesting element Audi brought up is the fluidity of faith: faith typically wavers, exhibiting peaks and valleys. Beliefs can waver too, but not characteristically so. For instance, an untenured person can have faith in her own capacities as a researcher, but this faith can be frequently shaken (e.g., by unsuccessful job applications) or occasionally boosted (e.g., by successful publication). Similarly, religious faith has this fluid, wavering, pattern with peaks (e.g., through religious experience or reading a particularly strong paper in philosophy of religion) and valleys (e.g., by being confronted by gratuitous evil or strong naturalistic arguments). Audi claims that the rationality of faith and religious commitment cannot be purely gauged by standards usually employed for rationality for beliefs. Rather, faith has its own standards of rationality.